Beyond being a mentor Dec. 5, 2012
The condition of our former temporary boss shocked me.
He looked old and haggard, a slight yellowish tint to his
skin that suggest some inner condition still too early to diagnosis, an ailment
just making itself a home in him that might later express itself more meanly.
He might have looked this way for months, escaping my notice
because I talked to him over the telephone but rarely saw him.
Her name did not come up; we had so much else to talk about.
Superstorms like Sandy left as much human wreckage as it did
flooded streets, perhaps explaining how down and out he seemed.
He seemed more bitter than usual, focused particularly on the
two owners.
He felt their open hostility towards him, especially from
the male owner who seemed to go out of his way to disrespect him.
“They’re afraid of me,” he told me over dinner last night. “They
don’t want to give me too much power.”
The male owner and he had been sniping at each other for
months.
But he has seemed most lost since she left in October, her presence
bolstering his ego at a time when our company did its best to make him feel unimportant.
She made him feel significant.
Why she did this is less imperative now than the fact of mutual
benefit, she encouraged him at times when he felt particularly down, and out of
this came some legitimate feeling.
Her forced resignation left a vacancy in his life, nobody
else can fill. For all the disrespect he gets here, his job seems incredibly important
to him, and she—while here – acted as a crutch, someone he would lean on at
times when he could lean on nothing else.
But she seems to have moved on.
While no doubt she keeps in contact with him as she does one
of the office gossips and most likely the male owner as well, it is not the
same intimacy they had working together.
Her poems about moving out of her comfort zone and about how
she ought to have found success, speak about lessons learned over the last year
and suggests that mentors, who have tried to guide her, are merely human after
all.
This last was something she posted on her Facebook page, and
may have been a message to him, perhaps suggesting that she has moved beyond him
as her mentor as well.
Whatever plans she has for the future, he does not appear to
be part of them, something sad considering everything.
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